Since many of you are writing your papers now, I thought that I’d share these thoughts with you. I probably have said all these at various points during our group and individual meetings. But as I continue my AC reviews these days (that’s 70 papers and 200+ reviews — between me and my AC partner), these following points just keep coming up. Not enough people conduct first class research. And not enough people write good papers.

– Every research project and every paper should be conducted and written with one singular purpose: *to genuinely advance the field of computer vision*. So when you conceptualize and carry out your work, you need to be constantly asking yourself this question in the most critical way you could – “Would my work define or reshape xxx (problem, field, technique) in the future?” This means publishing papers is NOT about “this has not been published or written before, let me do it”, nor is it about “let me find an arcane little problem that can get me an easy poster”. It’s about “if I do this, I could offer a better solution to this important problem,” or “if I do this, I could add a genuinely new and important piece of knowledge to the field.” You should always conduct research with the goal that it could be directly used by many people (or industry). In other words, your research topic should have many ‘customers’, and your solution would be the one they want to use. Read more…